The wish in question is about feed statistics for WordPress.com blogs. About a month ago, feed stats were retired:
we bid farewell to our good friend Feed Stats, which tried to tell you how many subscribers you had to your blog and what software they used… Perhaps someday feed stats will return, but when they do we hope to do a much better job of collecting and presenting the data.
There was quite an outcry about this (follow the above link and see the comments for specific sobs). I didn’t join the outcry, partly because I found my WordPress.com feed stats highly implausible anyway. There are several topics in the WordPress.com forums about using Feedburner, and it can be done, but not in a way that is likely to give good stats.
With this in mind, today’s Feedburner-related news from Pete Cashmore is particularly interesting.
Feedburner’s new owner Google has gone ahead and integrated the feed tracking service into its Blogspot/Blogger.com blog platform… In other words: if you want detailed stats on who is reading your Blogger blog, it’s now easy to do.
If Feedburner can be integrated in to Blogger, surely it can be integrated in to WordPress.com? After all, WordPress.com currently uses Analytics and other services from Google. Let’s take a look at how Pete closes his post.
What we’re interested to see: will Feedburner ever be integrated into Google Analytics, creating a comprehensive stats package for blogs and news sites?
I think that those of us who blog at WordPress.com have reason to be particularly interested in this. Some of us suspect that it may have been what Matt was referring to when he referred to a future “much better job of collecting and presenting the [feed] data.”
Agreed. 😉